One donor egg and ‘a dollop of love’: ART and de-queering genealogies in Facebook advertising

We consider what genealogical links, kinship and sociality are promised through the marketing of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). Using a mixed method of formal analysis of Facebook's algorithmic architectures and textual analysis of twenty-eight adverts for egg donation drawn from the Facebook Ad Library, we analyse the ways in which the figure of the ‘fertile woman’ is constituted both within the text and at the level of Facebook's targeted advertising systems. We critically examine the ways in which ART clinics address those women whose eggs they wish to harvest and exchange, in combination with the ways in which Facebook's architecture identifies, and sorts those women deemed of ‘relevance’ to the commercial ART industry. We find that women variously appear in these adverts as empowered consumers, generous girlfriends, potential mothers and essentialised bodies who provide free-floating eggs. The genealogical and fertility possibility offered through ART is represented with banal ambiguity wherein potentially disruptive forms of biogenetic relatedness and arrangements of kinship are derisked by an overarching narrative of simplicity and sameness which excludes men, messy genealogies and explicitly queer forms of kinship. This rationalisation is supported by the simplicity and certainty of the Facebook targeted advertising algorithm which produces a coherent audience and interpellates users as fertile subjects whose choices are both biologically determined and only available through clinical intervention.

Production Activities in Market Conditions: Specifics and Ways of Optimization

The purpose of the article is to substantiate the theoretical provisions of the peculiarities of the production of cultural and artistic products in the modern art space. The research methodology is based on the principles of a logical approach. Comparative and interdisciplinary approaches are applied. The scientific novelty lies in identifying the main factors that determine the effectiveness of production activities, actualize and stimulate scientific discourse regarding methods of managing the cultural sphere, reveal the features and ways of optimizing the creation, proposal, and production of precisely those projects that demonstrate significant advantages of the producer over competitors, stimulate the creation in Ukraine, a reduced market for cultural services. Conclusion. Deep and comprehensive modernization of the art sphere requires the search for new approaches to optimizing content production. The optimization of production activities is focused on structuring the costs of the cultural and artistic project by deepening, expanding, and updating the professional knowledge, skills, and practical experience of the producer. It is determined that production activity is a multicomponent process in which financial, technical, legal, and labor resources are involved. All these components, one way or another, are related to creativity. In order for a cultural and artistic project to be competitive, it is necessary to take into account the following factors: digitalization of the consumer audience; tastes of the consumer audience; content criticism. Keywords: producer, production activity, production project, art management, art industry, art dealer, art businessman, optimization of production activities.

Rare Objects and the Rhapsodic World of Yoruba Elite Art Collectors: Preliminary Notes

This paper is a preliminary note on the data collected during my research on archives in Nigeria in the summer of 2013. While I examined both public and private archives, I found the private archives particularly those in the cities in southwestern Nigeria to be surprisingly rich in objects that are rare, new, and sometimes with unusual subject matter. The archives belong to notable elite collectors who are the de facto shapers of the art industry in Nigeria today. Their archives are worth art-historlcal study in terms of the richness of the col­lectlon, and because the sites are the contemporary repositories of not only an­clent art but also traditional, modern and contemporary works of art. From the range and volume of the collections, the archives seem to have taken over from the government-owned museums. The shift is very interesting to study as one traces the trajectory of art acquisition and accumulation from pre-modern to modern institutions. The preliminary submission here is that Nigerian elite art collectors are lnterveners and game changers. Their intervention could be seen in two ways: First, as rescuers of disappearing cultures and by the same plat­form they are pivotal to reclamation of cultural patrimony. Secondly, as game changers and transformative agencies the elite collectors become culture bro­kers who work assiduously to stem 'culture flight' and 'heritage drain'. The plat­forms they offer grant them boasting rights as art connoisseurs and promotes the affirmation of elite power within the matrix of a post-colonial nation state.

Application of Gauss Mutation Genetic Algorithm to Optimize Neural Network in Image Painting Art Teaching

With the continuous application of the art industry in various fields, more and more people choose to systematically learn the knowledge of the art industry. In the art major, image painting is one of the important contents of the art major. How to improve students’ aesthetic quality and comprehensive professional quality is studied, in which the content learning of image painting art is the key. Therefore, we have carried out technical exploration and result analysis based on Gaussian mutation genetic algorithm to optimize the application of neural network in image painting art teaching. We use Gaussian mutation genetic algorithm to study the neural network optimized teaching cloud platform technology. Compared with the traditional algorithm, the algorithm proposed in this paper has more funny computational efficiency, being able to comprehensively evaluate and improve students’ aesthetic quality and comprehensive professional quality. Gaussian mutation genetic algorithm can effectively improve the knowledge search ability of the platform and the running speed of the teaching platform. In the future research in the field of art industry, neural network will optimize the teaching cloud platform technology, which has laid a solid foundation for improving students’ aesthetic quality and comprehensive professional quality.

Implementation of Zero Emission Fast Shortsea Shipping

The paper describes the implementation of state-of-the-art “Industry 4.0” methods and tools, a holistic ship design optimization and modular production methods, as well as advanced battery technologies to enable a fully electrical, fast zero-emission waterborne urban transport. The design of a fast catamaran passenger ferry demonstrator planned for operation as a waterborne shuttle in the Stavanger/Norway area and of a replicator for operation at Thames River/London are elaborated, including infrastructural issues for their operation. The presented research is in the frame of the H2020 funded project “TrAM – Transport: Advanced and Modular” (www.tramproject.eu)

Reprowebs: a conceptual approach to elasticity and change in the global assisted reproduction industry

In the last few decades, assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) have become increasingly transregional and transnational, often involving travel within or between countries or even continents. Until recently, the global ART industry was marked by so-called ‘reprohubs’—places (such as southern California, Dubai, Anand, and Mumbai) specializing in the provision of reproductive services. While reprohubs continue to exist, in the last few years, many have splayed out, transforming into something more akin to webs that encompass, but go beyond these hubs. These webs show a unique dynamic capability to tighten, entangle, or extend in reaction to local and global changes, a characteristic which became particularly obvious during the global Covid-19 pandemic. In this paper, we propose conceptualizing this new dynamic capability as ‘reprowebs’—an approach that adds a new dimension to the existing conceptualization of reproductive travel and helps us to better understand current developments in the global ART industry.

Egg Donation in Art. Legal and Logical Arguments

"The procuring of eggs and compensatory measures for donors today present unresolved ethical and conceptual issues, which fuel the growth of the assisted reproductive technology (ART) industry. The speech proposes a problematization of the phenomenon from a legal point of view, supported by a rhetorical-argumentative analysis of the legal institutions. The legal provision of oocytes admits the only donation. It was deduced by analogy from the legislative provisions of available of organs and tissues (law no. 458 of 1967; law no. 301 of 1993; law no. 91 of 1999; law no. 483 of 1999), which provides for the balance between impairment of the psycho-physical sphere and goods that benefit from it. Is this balance comparable to the available of oocytes? Or does it need an autonomous redefinition? The various national regulations show that in Europe the term donation includes not only solutions of substantial gratuity, but also various forms of compensation. On one side this shows the fragility of the definition of donation, rhetorically constructed through the Aristotelian argument of the dissociation between reimbursement and remuneration, and on the other it makes clear the need to use logical-argumentative tools to disclose the criterion of hierarchization of values in game. It remains to be understood how ethical reflection, led by an argumentative legal analysis, can provide the tools to improve the functioning of a system that seems to render donors’ rights unfit for use. "

Rancangan Garap Karya Gending Sekar Jagad Berbasis Motif Batik Gaya Yogyakarta

The creation of works employing transforming media becomes an exciting breakthrough in the art industry to study. Using the concept of changing the media, the meeting of the two different media, such as art and music, provides opportunities for the emergence of a broader range of creative work. The design of musical works based on the inspiration and philosophy from the media of batik has complexity and beauty and high value as the great works from the Indonesian ancestors. Sekar Jagad is a title for the composition of musical design, taken from the name of a batik motif that is very familiar in Javanese culture. By understanding the basic batik motifs such as gringsing, kawung, machete, nitik, cement and poleng, the elements of vocal melodies performed in two different voices gave an overview of the concept of the Sekar Jagad batik motif. It indeed required knowledge of the shape, function and character of the batik motif itself as the basis for gending in musical arts. The melody arrangement was made entirely with two tunings or pelog and slendro scales. It was intended to find the characters that best suits the characteristics and philosophy of batik. The elements of batik motifs that were put together into one Sekar Jagad batik motif were then applied through vocal melodies and supported by lyrics that described some of these batik elements.

On the Social-Relational Moral Standing of AI: An Empirical Study Using AI-Generated Art

The moral standing of robots and artificial intelligence (AI) systems has become a widely debated topic by normative research. This discussion, however, has primarily focused on those systems developed for social functions, e.g., social robots. Given the increasing interdependence of society with nonsocial machines, examining how existing normative claims could be extended to specific disrupted sectors, such as the art industry, has become imperative. Inspired by the proposals to ground machines’ moral status on social relations advanced by Gunkel and Coeckelbergh, this research presents online experiments (∑N = 448) that test whether and how interacting with AI-generated art affects the perceived moral standing of its creator, i.e., the AI-generative system. Our results indicate that assessing an AI system’s lack of mind could influence how people subsequently evaluate AI-generated art. We also find that the overvaluation of AI-generated images could negatively affect their creator’s perceived agency. Our experiments, however, did not suggest that interacting with AI-generated art has any significant effect on the perceived moral standing of the machine. These findings reveal that social-relational approaches to AI rights could be intertwined with property-based theses of moral standing. We shed light on how empirical studies can contribute to the AI and robot rights debate by revealing the public perception of this issue.